And, to be honest, today’s library action was so close to our utopian vision that we’d like to repeat the whole thing all over again on Friday 12th April (t.b.c.). “So”, we hear you cry, “what was all this excitement you speak of?”.

Well, readers, for one thing, the 1in12 was like yer actual social centre of your dreams, with folk cataloguing books, some people preparing lovely food for the imminent Freedom Fundraiser meal, and a fanzine publisher (if that’s not too grand a term) cutting, folding and stapling like there’s not tomorrow. Which there is, at a zine fest, obviously.

Those people who get a weird buzz watching the mile-o-meter click over to all the zeros would have been thrilled in that moment when the 4000th book fell under the rubber stamp and incremental numbering machine, and “Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration” took its place in the long list of books which you now have an actual chance of locating within the library, as well as discovering whether it’s available or out on loan (we’ll explain how that works another time).

Which seemed like a bit of synchronicity really, as the trial of the London Critical Mass defendants came to its predictably rubbish and unjust conclusion. Though most weeks there’s appalling news for cyclists, and humans generally, somewhere on the planet, so perhaps not too much for the numerologists to get excited about.

Meanwhile, the Library continues its usual business with a book discussion under the aegis of the Feminist Reading Group on Thursday 21st March (“The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin) and some regular cataloguing and scanning pranks on Thursday 4th April. As referred above, we’re half-planning another all-day cataloguing session on Friday 12th, before we have to clear the decks for a big party night, followed possibly by a book sale on 13th April to help the Library’s non-existent finances.

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Aside from all the happenings we mentioned in our last posting, we continue to work on bringing the juiciest bits of the 1in12 Library to the wider world by way of our ten-year-old scanning equipment.

Incidentally, we’re aware that these aren’t truly our juicy fruits – the Anarchy magazines we’re currently scanning are all someone else’s work, and we hope the many authors in question, and their descendants (if they’re hoping for that 70-years worth of publishing royalties payola) will take a merciful view of our activities. It’s obvious that others have planned on scanning these journals (have a search on the internet and you’ll see) so we think – by placing them on the Internet Archive in an ad-free neutral zone – we’re doing something which is, on balance, beneficial. We have, at least, been in touch with the original publishers and got a warm tweet in response, so we intend to continue unless a genuine problem arises. Also – we think – the collectors who have left these publications to us probably would prefer that they were widely read rather than locked up in The Special Room.

The tweet of Freedom

So, to cut to the chase, we’ve now scanned issues 1 – 42 of Anarchy magazine, with three exceptions where we don’t (yet) have a copy of the magazine.

We’ve experimented a bit with resolution in the interests of speed and getting the job done – let us know if you think the later copies are noticeably worse than the early ones. We’ll be doing another batch in week or two so we value your feedback.

The files are all text-searchable PDFs (with the usual hilarious OCR errors – sorry) so we hope you’ll be able to make use of them.

Anarchy 14 – April 1962 – Disobedience and the new pacifism (Nicolas
Walter) / The state and society (Colin Ward) / Gandhi on the theory of
voluntary servitude (Gene Sharp)

Anarchy 15 – May 1962 – The work of David Wills (Anthony Weaver) /
Clinical aspects of the work of David Wills (‘Consultant Psychiatrist’) /
Down in the jungle (David Downes) / Do we want happy children? (Dachine
Rainer)

Anarchy 18 – August 1962 – Comprehensive schools / Educating the
non-scholastic (H. Raymond King) / Bombed site and comprehensive school
(Winifred Hindley) / A last look round (Sixth-Former) / Some were all right
(Early Leaver) / Eleven-plus and the comprehensive (Parent)/ A senior
concert of the high school of music and art (Paul Goodman) / Down there
with Isherwood (Dachine Rainer) / The anarchists from outside (Nicholas
Harman)

Anarchy 23 – January 1963 – Housing and helplessness (John Ellerby) /
Do it yourself (Ian Nairn) / Miners who run their own pit (Douglas Stuckey)
/ Direct action for houses: the story of the squatters / We built our own
(Harry Deverson) / What hope for housing societies? (Tristram Shandy) /
Bethnal Green: a museum of housing (Colin Ward) / A man’s ambition must be
small (Jack Robinson) / John Rae and the myths of war (Arthur Uloth)

Anarchy 24 – February 1963 – The Community Of Scholars (Tom Jones),
Stolen fruits of a classical education (Simon Raven), Primitive societies
and social myths (Kenneth Maddock), Schizophrenia; a social disease (John
Linsie)

Anarchy 26 – April 1963 – The last Aldermaston (Charles Radcliffe) / What has
it got to do with the bomb? (Brian Richardson) / The factory for peace (Tom
McAlpine) / How to sell your way to slavery (Ian Sainsbury) / Thoreau’s
politics of the upright man (Richard Drinnon).

Anarchy 29 – July 1963 – The Spies for Peace Story: 1. What Official Secret?
2. In the Beginning… 3. The Ripples Spread 4. Informing the Public 5.
More Secrete…More Demonstrations 6. Fallout 7. Whodunit? 8. The State
Hits Back 9. Onto the Banned-Waggon! 10. RSGs, Parliament and the State 11.
Conclusions

Anarchy 35 – January 1964 – House and home (C.W.) / Are council houses
necessary? (Peter Neville) / Of course they are (Caleb Williams) / The
multiple family housing unit (Teddy Gold) / In the urban jungle (J.E. &
A.B.) / Self-help housing in South America: The Barriada: a case history
(William Mangin) / A revolutionary fable (Gene Sharp).

We’ll be having another cataloguing and re-shelving session on Thursday 7th March, from 8.45* in the evening. There’ll be someone there to show you how the cataloguing works, and by the end of the evening we’ll have more stuff in a place where people can find it and make use of it.

On 21st the Feminist Reading Group will be talking about The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, so we’ll take a break from organising books and actually look at the contents just for once.

Plans for April and May are still in the works, get in touch if you’ve any suggestions. There’s a likelihood we’ll be showing some Reel News dvd footage at some point soon.

“Commonweal are having our Second Annual lecture on 7th March at 6:30pm which is also the launch date of the Peacemakers exhibition which forms part of the Routes to Peace festival: http://routestopeace.wordpress.com/about/.
We are delighted to welcome Sharyn Lock to talk about how she and 43 other ‘ordinary people’ empowered themselves to take action and break the sea blockade to Gaza.”

Seeing those photos of charred and incinerated journals at Freedom Press was a bit shocking. We’d already scanned one of our back issues of “Anarchy”, the 1960’s periodical (monthly for most of its run) when we had an enquiry from an academic researching Landauer (or was it Buber?) and, it turned out, our grim Northern library was one of the places that had Anarchy No. 54.

Scanning journals is time consuming and you don’t immediately see any results (i.e. the people benefitting tend not to visit the premises). But seeing those burned editions of Freedom was quite an eye opener. It’s not the paper, it’s the words on the paper. And Bradford is a place where buildings burn down mysteriously all the time. It works out pretty well for the slumlords who can get the missing piece for their development plan on easy terms from obdurate independent types suddenly finding themselves in charge of a smouldering ruin, or exchange a high-maintenance low-income historic mill for a zero-maintenance pay & display car park with the toss of a match. Allegedly.

So, as part of our cataloguing frenzy we’ve scanned the first 10 editions of Anarchy, from 1961, and most of them are online now (there are a few upload issues outstanding) – they’re in searchable PDF format and you can also just download the text.

If you’re local to Bradford you could help us by coming in sometime to help us catalogue, scan, or sweep up (these are all necessary tasks of equal value and glamour). Check the 1in12 website for dates, or leave a comment below. Further afield, you can (a) let people know about our efforts, on your blog or whatever passes for conversation nowadays, or just send a big cheque to The 1in12 Library, 21-23 Albion Street, Bradford BD1 2LY.

Although, in the immediate, if you’re sending money anywhere it should probably be to Freedom Press.

Meanwhile, if you have a new-ish scanner you don’t need, we’d love to have it. Currently we have to use an old (slow) computer to scan as the scanners we have won’t talk to the newer computers. It takes ages. Get in touch.

Finally (1), if you’re one of those people who enjoys filling in grant funding applications we’re pretty sure this is the kind of project that has “give me your money” written all over it. And we do owe the 1in12 Club about 15 years in peppercorn rent and utility contributions. So get in touch if you know the magic words that can crack open the wallets of babylon for us, and if you can look at those forms without getting a migraine.

Finally (2), If you enjoy building work we’ve got a serious ceiling insulation project booked so we don’t have to suffer another expensive and chilly winter in the library. This isn’t going to happen imminently as we’ve no money for materials. But we have plans (including a groovy Library Disco) so, eventually, there may be some kind of bring-yer-tools weekender. Watch this space.

The journals are here: Anarchy 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, – note we don’t have a copy of no. 2, but we do have some doubles of other issues. Get in touch if you can help.

Some people using the Library. And some boxes of literature awaiting cataloging.

We’re having a bit of a cataloguing session on 7th February, so if you’re interested in helping us get more books sorted and catalogued so folks can find them, that would a great occasion for you.

Someone will be on site from 10.00 a.m. onwards, until 10.00 p.m. and there’ll be snacks and drinks available.

If cataloguing books sounds a bit dull and you just want to have a look around, that’s fine too. Often visitors ask if they can take books away, and (relatedly) how to join the library. It should be a simple question with an easy answer – and there are some signs we made once (see below) which got lost in a redecoration drama – but it does depend on the shallow pool of volunteers not being totally over-committed and becoming only semi-available. So the longer answer is, yes, joining and borrowing can happen, but only if a few more people get involved in running the resource.

In our occasional series of “Lunch With A Purpose” we bring you, on 15th December, from noon, coffee, cake, lots of lovely food, and some actual Library-type activity befitting a social club built on the principles of good company and self-improvement. To wit:

Tech Tools For Activism – we’ll have new copies of this booklet containing information on the following:

Email & Email Lists

Anonymous Blogs and Websites

Microblogging Beyond Twitter

Browsing the Internet Safely

Organising & Networking Online

Mobile Phone Security and Android Apps

Publishing your News

Uploading Media to the Internet

Green Computing

Hiding & Deleting Things on your PC

…and we hope to have some discussion around the themes emerging from some of this topics.

We’ll have some other recent additions to the Libary’s collection to look at too, and possibly a short session on cataloguing and adding new borrowers to the system, if that’s on interest to anyone.

We’ll also be looking at some short films from Tactical Technology Collective, overlapping onto some of the same subject areas as the TTFA booklet.

Finally we’ll bring it back to basics with a look at how we organise ourselves, with a discussion around mailing lists and a look at how the collectives within the club organise their “web presence”, a review of the 1in12.com website, consideration of the implications for our history of having a fragmented approach to web solutions, and some questions arising from that: Does it make us weaker or stronger? For a social centre what are the benefits and what are the costs of an internet free-for all? How do I get a log-in? Who maintains all these things against a background of inevitable membership churn?

The online short from the project Beauty and the Bike. Why do girls stop cycling in car-centric countries, whilst their counter-parts in cycling-friendly countries use the bicycle as a teenage tool for independence and liberation? This project sets out to find out.

Short documentary film inspired by the book “Recycled Memories”, about cycling in Northern Ireland in the ’40s and ’50s, looking at how cycling helps to overcome weaknesses, if it influences perception on reality and simply proves the importance of sport in our lives.